Conclusion: Literary customs and the socio-historical question

Summary

The foregoing chapters have examined the highly specialized usage of customs as literary devices in a given world of medieval fiction, indicating their various functions in providing unity and coherence within and among the individual texts that make up that world. Yet precisely because the creator of these devices designated them by the term contemporaneously used in the vernacular to designate certain varieties of feudal legal transactions, he also created the potential for raising issues germane to the concerns of the social historian; at least some measurement of the common ground between fiction and history seems in this case to be a distinct possibility. The student of medieval literature may prefer to remain content with the literary dimension, leaving to medieval historians the question of how Chrétien's literary customs compare to customs within the late twelfth-century socio-historical sphere. Yet we cannot simply dismiss the question. Erich Köhler, who opened it on a modest scale a quarter of a century ago, wisely enclosed the term “coutume” in quotation marks as if to emphasize contrast between literary devices and historical phenomena; in so doing, however, he cast only a brief glance at the historical properties of medieval custom reflected in Chrétien's works, while treating the question within the unduly restricted optic of his own socio-historical thesis. Our conclusion will reconsider these issues, in the hope of stimulating further reflection on the ways in which our inquiry into the literary order may have implications for inquiries into the historical order as well.